By Sarah Najjar

While words often seem too limited for us to talk about death – they carry the weight of history, culture and beliefs – art offers a boundless range of possibilities. Artistically depicting death allows us to break away from existing clichés, which are often dark, sad and fatalistic, and to reappropriate the subject in a different way.

Through colours, shapes and dialogues whose only contours are our imagination, we can reinvent a death that is acceptable to us, one with which we can form a kind of friendship or acquaintance.

Whatever art we choose (drawing, photography, sculpture, music…) we can make this reality resonate differently at the heart of our lives, and thus better prepare ourselves for death.

I like to draw death in watercolour, in an abstract, highly coloured way, made up of thousands of tiny specks that seem to come alive as they appear to move. My image of death becomes joyful, funny and sympathetic, and I carry it with me.

How do you imagine death? How do you experience it with your five senses?

Images and writing by Sarah Najjar.  See her website (in French): www.sana-illustration.com/